Humane's Revolutionary AI-Powered Wearable: A Replacement for Smartphones?

Buzz has been building around the secretive tech startup Humane for over a year, and now the company is finally offering a look at what it’s been building. 

At TED last month, Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri gave a demonstration of the AI-powered wearable the company is building as a replacement for smartphones. 

The device appears to be a small black puck that slips into your breast pocket, with a camera, projector, and speaker sticking out the top. 

Throughout the 13-minute presentation, Chaudhri walks through a handful of use cases for Humane’s gadget, including answering phone calls, getting translations, and reading out summaries of emails and messages.

Chaudhri pitched the device as a salve for a world covered in screens, designed to be more natural by eschewing the screen. “You don’t need a smartphone or any other device to pair with it,” he said. 

It’s an impressive demo and a neat idea, but it leaves a ton of open questions, from how much of this demo is real to how this device can actually fit into our lives. 

Questions include how the device can be used if you don’t have a shirt or jacket with a breast pocket, how it accepts calls, and how it gets any of your digital information.

Other questions include how much of the device's processing happens on-device versus in the cloud, and whether it has third-party apps.

Chaudhri says Humane will have more to share in the “next few months.” We’re looking forward to learning more — and hopefully, getting a lot more answers.